On the Birth of Writing, Out of the Asshole of Censorship (as Fertilized by the Risen Christ); or, A Memory of Childhood in One Damn Long Sentence

When Mrs. Trieb, our fearsome harridan of a second grade teacher, who was faster with a paddle than Jack Palance with a six-gun, and who, out of a sadistic rage more obscurely sourced than the Danube (somewhere in the Black Forest of her mind, a man in lederhosen was constantly pissing on her), cracked the ass of at least one student per day for the same reason that guards on a chain gang would flog a random prisoner each evening, to perpetuate an atmosphere of general terror, pronounced her edict henceforth forbidding the production and/or dissemination of KISS pictures in her domain (because, as she informed us, her minister had presented her with a cassette tape (this she produced from her purse and displayed as ocular proof) on which a second minister’s disembodied voice (like that heard by Abraham, by Moses, by Saul-become-Paul, by many other schizophrenics) had revealed that the band’s initials were an acronym for Knights In Satan’s Service, that their name rhymed with ‘hiss’ (the deceiving word on the serpent’s tongue), and that their music was a tool employed by the Evil One to lure little boys and even girls into battle against the One True Lord Our Father God Who Are In Heaven Jesus Christ Redeemer Save Us Poor Sinners urgathok narlypok turgathock ragnok (here Mrs. Trieb spoke briefly in tongues)), I, the principle creator and distributor of such images, obsessively drawing, in pencil, ink, and/or crayon on any available paper, representations (reminiscent in their naïve flatness of the lesser works of Henri Rousseau) of Gene, Paul, et alii in flame-spewing concert, and regularly presenting said drawings, as tokens of my courtly love, to pigtailed Patty the irresistible tomboy, was forced under threat of oaken spanking to cease production of these pictures and retreat, beneath the totalitarian eye of Frau Trieb, into the anal banality of landscape (geometric houses with facelike facades set between ballooning trees and triangular mountains under an ever-smiling sun, all but the solar silver dollar baselined on a ground as flat as Deaf Smith County, Texas), but the mind that mechanically produced such sub-sub-Grandma Moses pabulum, far from ceasing its darker explorations, channeled them immediately into the medium of speech, thus avoiding dictatorial regulation via the ur-samizdat of the oral tradition, recreating image as the Sinaitically blasphemous Word that was with God and impossibly was God, telling epic tales of KISS and Friends to envious and rather incredibly credulous fellow students every afternoon on the playground, a subversive strategy that eventually returned to paper when my narrative desire discovered the outlet of writing, that inky onanism, that black ejaculation spurting fertile words across the page, the transformation back to ink forcing the endless improvisations of speech into the rigorous mould of sentence form, the beginning-middle-ending shape of rise, climax, and fall, all falling into bathos like the confetti around red Patty’s head when I proudly presented her my inaugural endeavor, “KISS In Space” (it was the September after Star Wars), and she, mini-Michiko Kakutani, eagerly tore my unread pages into tiny pieces and tossed them into the air.